A Highguard developer who was amongst these lately laid off has criticised the way in which the sport and its creators had been handled on-line following its reveal.
Highguard, the debut recreation from Wildlight Leisure, was introduced with nice fanfare on the shut of December’s The Sport Awards. Developed by veterans of the hero shooter style, the sport combines FPS mechanics with rideable mounts and ‘raid’ mechanics, with groups tasked with breaching one another’s bases.
After weeks of silence, it then launched as a free-to-play title for PC and consoles on January 26 and appeared to take pleasure in a powerful begin with almost 100,000 concurrent gamers on Steam, however acquired combined opinions after launch and noticed its concurrent gamers drop severely – on the time of writing, the sport hasn’t handed 5,000 concurrent Steam gamers all week.
After a designer claimed that “most” of the staff had been laid off, Wildlight subsequently confirmed that it had laid off “various staff members whereas conserving a core group of builders to proceed innovating on and supporting the sport”.
One in all these laid off staff members, tech artist Josh Sobel, has now taken to X to criticise the way in which the sport was handled by gamers after its preliminary reveal, suggesting it performed a big half within the recreation’s present state of affairs.
Sobel claimed that every one the suggestions the staff had acquired previous to the sport’s reveal, “even from unbiased sources”, was broadly optimistic, with alleged feedback reminiscent of “there’s no method this can flop”, “this has mainstream hit written throughout it” and “if there’s one venture no person within the business is fearful will fail, it’s yours”.
After the reveal at The Sport Awards, nonetheless, Sobel says it “was all downhill from there”, claiming that YouTubers posting ‘ragebait’ content material performed a big function in driving negativity.
“Content material creators like to level out the bias in of us who give optimistic previews after being flown out for an occasion, however ignore the truth that when their negative-leaning content material will get 10x the engagement of the optimistic, they’ve obtained simply as a lot incentive to lean right into a disingenuous course, whether or not consciously or not,” he wrote.
Sobel claims he acquired private assaults on account of his “naïveté on Twitter”, saying: “Many content material creators made movies and posts about me and my cowardice, amassing thousands and thousands of views and inadvertently sending lots of of offended players into my replies. They laughed at me for being happy with the sport, instructed me to get out the McDonald’s functions, and mocked me for itemizing having autism in my bio, which they appeared to assume was proof the sport could be ‘woke trash’. All of this was very emotionally taxing.”
Stating that it’s “not my place” to touch upon whether or not the sport would have been higher acquired had its preliminary unveiling not been a “huge highlight” as the ultimate reveal at The Sport Awards, Sobel says the sport was however declared “useless on arrival” inside minutes of the announcement.
“Each one in every of our movies on social media obtained downvoted to hell,” he mentioned. “Feedback sections had been flooded with copy/paste meme phrases reminiscent of ‘Harmony 2′ and ‘Titanfall 3 died for this’. At launch, we acquired over 14k evaluate bombs from customers with lower than an hour of playtime. Many didn’t even end the required tutorial.”
He added: “In discussions on-line about Highguard, Harmony, 2XKO, and such, it’s typically identified by players that devs prefer to blame players for his or her failures, and that that’s foolish, as if players haven’t any energy. However they do. Lots of it.
“I’m not saying our failure is only the fault of gamer tradition and that the sport would have thrived with out the unfavourable discourse, but it surely completely performed a job. All merchandise are on the whims of the shoppers, and the shoppers put absurd quantities of effort into slandering Highguard. And it labored.”
Sobel’s publish on X has acquired quite a lot of replies, starting from some folks backing him and the staff, to others suggesting that different elements could have additionally performed a job within the recreation’s underwhelming launch, its largely hyped reveal apart.
Some replies have recommended that releasing with out a beta or every other method of receiving suggestions from gamers could have resulted in a weaker recreation, and that the staff could have put an excessive amount of belief within the largely optimistic suggestions acquired from friends early on.
Others have recommended that the very fact the sport launched with almost 100,000 concurrent gamers on Steam alone implies that even when a few of these folks had been ‘unhealthy actors’ trying to publish unfavourable opinions, there was nonetheless an opportunity to maintain a bigger variety of them on board if the sport had been participating sufficient.
Wildlight had detailed a 12 months of post-launch content material for Highguard and launched the sport’s second ‘episode’, with new maps and gadgets, simply final week.
Talking to Polygon forward of launch, Wildlight’s studio head Chad Grenier claimed that he wasn’t involved about reaching giant participant numbers, saying: “Whether or not it will get a thousand folks or 100 million folks, it doesn’t matter. What issues most is that the sport is beloved by the individuals who performed it.”
